Sunday, October 09, 2016

Not Subtle; Not Quaint

There is a particularly harrowing scene in Mad Men, when Don
Draper—the advertising executive at the center of the show—exhibits his
dominance over one of his (very many) sexual partners and adversaries by
grabbing her by the crotch. There is nothing sexy or seductive about the
action. It is violent. It is chilling. It is hard to watch.

But what it is not is anomalous.

Last week we all saw a video in which we can hear, loud and
clear, the voice of the GOP nominee for president boasting about his sexually
predatory behavior against women. He
says,

I just start kissing them. It’s
like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.

And when you’re a star, they let
you do it. You can do anything.

[…]

Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do
anything.

Despite the barrage of misogynist statements he’s spewed on radio
and television over the last year, it was this clip
which finally shook the members of his political party out of their willing
slumber. They have condemned
him, expressed varying degrees of outrage, said they’re sickened by his words. They’ve
virtually stampeded towards the EXIT sign away from their party’s nominee for
president.

As if his words represented something never before heard,
never before seen, so deviant, that only now can they see him for the monster
that he is.

Except he’s not a monster. He’s a man. A man acculturated by
a long tradition of misogyny. I am glad that so many politicians have come out
against Trump (too little too late). But Trump himself may be closer to the
truth when he referred to his comments as “locker room banter” in an official
statement (to which I won’t link; but here is a WSJ
editorial about it). They are closer to the truth not because most men speak this way among one another (I doubt they
do), and they are certainly closer to the truth not because the alleged banality of this language is reason to
excuse it. Rather, they’re closer to the truth of a longstanding trope of
misogynist dominance over women’s bodies—a trope that medievalists know well.

Many readers of this blog were surely reminded of Chaucer’s
description of Nicholas’s assault on Alison,

And prively he caughte hire by the
queynte,
And seyde, “Ywis, but if ich have
my wille,
For deerne love of thee, lemman, I
spille.”

Nicholas grabbed her by the pussy. And then he said, “if I
have my will.” Don Draper grabbed Bobbie Barrett by the pussy. And then he
said, “Do what I say.” Donald Trump boasted that he “grab[s] ‘em by the pussy.
You can do anything.” Never original, Trump was availing himself of a stock
gesture of violence that expresses dominance over women via the route of women’s
bodies—arguably (arguably) even the body part that most defines a woman in
biological terms.

Medieval objects feature this gesture commonly (more commonly
than we’d imagined, in fact; but Damian uncovered a number of these images
relatively quickly and with ease). In certain cases, as in the Taymouth Hours, the gesture is an
explicit sign of sexual violence, condemned by the caption below.

Notice how in two of those images, the woman who are being
groped and grabbed and seized make gestures of shock. With their hands up and,
in one case, body turned away, they register the full horror of the assault.

One of the most significant contributions of this blog has
been to show us how much we live with the Middle Ages today, how much we speak
with phrases uttered hundreds of years ago, how much we see with eyes primed by
visual traditions of the medieval past. And one of the consequences of this
knowledge is that we can no longer dismiss as anomalous behaviors that are
objectionable and damaging. Nor can we condemn as anachronistic
or opportunistic scholars who would see in medieval art and literature deep resonance
with our culture today. The words spoken by the Republican nominee for
president emerge from our cultural legacy. It is up to us to engage with that
legacy until the day that is so truly beyond the pale of understanding, so
alien, that it becomes impossible to act and illegible to read.

3 comments:

This is a great post. I hadn't thought about the connections to the Miller's Tale and these images of violent sexual grabbing, and I'm looking forward to making the connection for students in my Canterbury Tales course.

I would also add that the outrage that we see now from Republican leaders is another old trope--in which charging someone else with antifeminism--and, more specifically, rape--can be another form of misogyny. It's not an accident that Trump's "grabbing" or married women was the straw that broke the camel's back for politicians and voters who excused anti-Muslim hatred, anti-woman abuse of Megyn Kelly and Rosie O'Donnell, and the outrageous racism of disqualifying a judge for being "Mexican" or his claims about the lives of black people. Trump disrespected women's status as the property of other men, and that was the breaking point. He threatened other men's control of women's sexuality. This was exactly the fight about rape and elopement that we see in the 1382 Statute of Rapes.